Help In The Garden

Stardate 18th and 23rd May 2009

It was time to plant the petit pois so I went out to the big veg patch and made the trough for the seeds; I was then joined by Cid and Snowy. As ever, they thought that the best place to lie was in the trough.



Patches on the other hand decided to chill.

Mouse Damage

Stardate 22nd April


I had my early courgettes and squashes germinating on the kitchen windowsill. Obviously someone thought it was a self-serve buffet. Mice in the kitchen are a no-no so it was time to get the trap out.

5 mice later and there is no further sign of any mice. It’s sad to have to use a killer trap but 4 cats and a humane trap weren’t catching any of the mice.

Snowy And Cid

Stardate 20th April

Snowy and Cid have come to an understanding. Snowy is still the top cat, the matriarch, despite being a much weaker cat these days; she’s coming up to 13 and is really showing her age since her ear operation, here and here.

Cid, even though he really wants to be the top cat, being the only male cat, knows his place. There have been the occasional spats but now most of the time they tolerate each other. So imagine my surprise when I spotted this:


I took the picture really quickly as I rightly thought that it wouldn’t last long. I think the togetherness was due less to friendship bit more because neither wanted to back down from having the seat. Still it was sweet while it lasted.

This Week I Have Been Mostly Weeding

In the blink of an eye the vegetable garden by the house has become overrun with weeds. Well to be honest they’ve been there for ages but as they grew so early the ground was far to wet to hoe. Now the decent weather is here they have gone to seed. The two main weeds on this area are groundsel and bittercress, which fires its seed as soon as you touch the plant.

Because of the number of ripe and ripening seed heads, hoeing was out of the question along with rotorvating. Hand weeding I decided was the best option, to try and remove as many seed heads as possible. It is taking ages but hopefully it will be worth it by reducing the number of plants I will have to deal with for the rest of the year.

Each 30m row takes about 2 hours to do but having done each bit and seeing the clear row is very rewarding. I’m about halfway down or to put it in a more positive light I’m half finished.



Here’s a picture to show all’s well with the world today.


Snowy is also back to her supervisor self. She eventually decided that the comfort of her chair and umbrella (as shown here) would be better but it’s so nice to have her behaving ‘normally’ again.

This week I’ve also blown a few eggs.


They are either for Christmas decorations or next Easter, as I’ve no chance of doing anything with them before next weekend. Doing them now made sense, at least at the time. I had the eggs and I wanted to make a couple of quiches for summer picnics. One useful thing about having the alpacas is that I have various syringes and needles that proved very useful. Having blown the eggs, I gave them a wash in a dilute bleach solution and using the syringe I was able to inject the solution into the eggs and wash the insides too.

Snowy Update

Many thanks to everyone for their thoughts about Snowy. I'm really pleased to say that she's back to her meowy self and following me around and getting under my feet again.

She's still a bit frail but then she is coming up to 14 and the operation to remove the cancer from her ear did seem to age her quite a bit but she still defends her position as top cat so I think all is well.

Cat Worries

Above is a picture of Snowy on her chair on Monday. She’s my oldest cat at 13.5 years and is beginning to show signs of her age. She’s still totally convinced I’m her human but she does spend a little more time these days sleeping. When she’s not sleeping, she is under my feet if I’m working outside, or sitting on the mouse or keyboard if I’m on the computer.

Tuesday though she decided to sleep for most of the day and when I got back from my French lesson she came to say hello and then went off again to sleep.

After my lesson on Wednesday I spent the afternoon keeping a close eye on her. She was only nibbling at food and when she didn’t come near the computer or sleep on the couch by me in front of the fire I knew something really wasn’t right.

So this morning it was off to the vets and the poor dear was running a temperature; it should have been between 38 and 39°C but she was at 40°C. She has a respiratory infection so along with the temperature she was finding breathing hard work.

One injection of antibiotics latter and we were on the way home; by the time we were back, after about 10 mins, she was meowing at me and as soon as we got in she demanded food.

I then went out to help Ann in the plum orchard, picking up the last of the firewood and by the time I came back she was a changed cat. She was sitting at the door waiting for me to come in and then demanded more food. She’s following me around, her fur feels smooth and silky again and she’s her chatty self and sitting on the keyboard again.

I can’t get over just how quickly she’s improved but I am just so happy that she has. I still have to try and get one and a half tablets down her throat each day for the next week to complete her antibiotics course but it will be worth it. Now where did I put all my plasters, I think I’m going to need them as Snowy hates taking tablets.

Hatching Potatoes

Hazel will sleep just about anywhere. She sat up when she heard me switch on the camera

Cats!

The bucket contains rainwater just the same as their bowl, but this has added dirt.

Time Flies

I'm finding it very hard to believe but it's only two years ago today that I was leaving the UK for France. Completion on my house happened at 12:30pm and I was on the 11pm ferry to a new life. Little did I know it would be 6 more weeks before I was allowed to buy my farm but the time has passed so fast.

I think the cats have forgiven me for their one and only stay in a cattery, they were there for 10 days, the time it was supposed to take for my house money to reach the notaire but that was without the bureaucracy taking over. I could have been on my way back but thankfully everything was finally resolved.

Here's to the next two years and the ones after that too.

Saturday’s Work

As ever there are at least 101 things to be done around here so I made a start on another one of them. I need to clear the two poplar trees that were felled across the area I’m turning into the veg plot.

I’m sorting through the branches and cleaning and putting aside any wood of a suitable size to burn – of which there is not a lot really, and burning the stuff that is too small – of which there is rather a lot. Poplar isn’t a good burning wood; I’ll have to season the logs for a couple of years I think, but it also means that the brash doesn’t burn that well either.



Luckily I’d removed some old hay from the barn that the alpacas didn’t want so I could use that as a starter; due to all the seeds in it I don’t put it on the compost heap. With the hay, an old cardboard box and later on some barbeque lighting fluid and I was to keep the burn going for 3 hours. I eventually cleared the area in the foreground of the above picture plus made a start on the area behind the tree trunk that’s hidden in this photo.

It doesn’t look very much in the photograph but the trunk is over a metre in diameter and the end of the tree, that just passes the first line of posts in the distance is around 40 metres away. A bit more work needed I think.

I had my supervisor of course, Snowy was really pleased when I peeled off my shirt, yes it really was t-shirt weather in the sun yesterday, and sat on it to make sure it didn’t go anywhere. The mist in the background of the picture is in fact smoke hanging round from my fire and the cooker, there wasn’t much breeze yesterday hence the t-shirt, albeit with a thermal vest underneath.

Snowy’s Operation

Thank you all again for your concern over Snowy and sorry for the delay in this post, life took over for a bit again.

Five o’clock (Friday) came and I was at the vets as arranged; Snowy was brought out in the arms of the vet. She was still not fully awake from the anaesthetic, but she was awake enough to meow and growl all the way home though.

There is a saying in the UK, “the lights are on but there is no-one at home”, which described Snowy perfectly. Her eyes were fully dilated but she had no real idea of what was she was doing. She did think she needed the litter tray but once she got in it she did her customary turn a rounds, slightly lost her balance and basically gave up and fell into a sort of sleep. Thankfully apart from some mud on the rim where I'd moved it with my boot, it was clean.



She also wanted to walk round the house but her back legs were not really holding her. She’d come up to an object and attempt to go round or over it and just collapse, quite often on her back with her paws in the air unable to figure out how to get up.

I had been due to go out that evening but had cancelled; I’m so glad I did. There was no way I would have been happy leaving her even if she was caged. She spent from 5 to gone 11 pm either being held on my lap until she fell back into a sleep or with me following round after her if she decided she just had to go for a walk. I had to be there, ether to pick her up or to stop her trying to jump up onto chairs and more importantly to stop her falling down all the steps in my house. It may be essentially a bungalow but nearly every room is on a different level and some of the steps are deep.

Come 11 pm I needed to sleep so I put her back into the pet carrier, much to her disgust, and placed her next to me on the bed. She was not happy to be caged again but did fall back to sleep.

I was awakened by her at about 5 am when I heard her grooming herself so I got her out for another drink etc. She was still very unsteady on her back legs so after about an hour, we both went back to bed for another couple of hours.

By the morning I was happy to leave her in the house for an hour and a half while I went out and now, Sunday morning, she’s more or less back to normal although she does know how to play the ‘I’m hurt, I need more milk’ look really well and has really relished the extra attention she has been getting.

I was really pleased that the vet didn’t have to take off as much of her ear as I feared and I was also surprised that she wasn’t given an antibiotic injection either. Instead I was instructed to bathe the wound three times a day with iodine but to bring her back immediately if I felt there was an infection. I’m quite pleased about that really, partially because it reduces the cost but mainly because it should mean that if she does need an antibiotic shot the chances of resistant bugs should be lower and she’s also quite happy for me to dab the iodine onto the ear.

She goes back to the vet in a fortnight to have the stitches out but she’s now sitting on my lap purring as I type this, back to normal, and as a bonus, I can touch her ear without her protesting, something I couldn’t do when it had the growth on it.

Waiting

It was -3°C this morning, Snowy is now at the vets awaiting her operation and I'm counting the seconds until she's back. After 12 years she's like a part of me, I keep expecting to turn round and trip over her :-D

I can't think to post what I've been doing the last couple of days until she's back so hopefully normal service will return this evening.

Vaccinations and Operation

Today, apart from being a dry and sunny day was also vet day. I’d left the cat food low last night so all the cats were hanging round me this morning. The cat-flap was then locked and the cats loaded into the baskets. Cid and Hazel are playmates so they are put together in the double basket while Patches and Snowy are in individual baskets. For various reasons; those two would be very upset to have to share a basket with any of the others. Patches because she’s attacked all the others due to her nerviness so they all attack her now and Snowy because she is top cat and doesn’t see why she should have to share with anyone else.

Today’s trip was for their rabies vaccination. It’s not that we are travelling anywhere but there have been a couple of cases of rabies both north and south of here where people have illegally brought animals into the country that have then turned out to have rabies, plus while there might not be many foxes about they too are carriers here.

While none of the cats were that happy about being bundled into the baskets they didn’t complain much so it was a very trouble free trip and Cid, Hazel and Patches all got a clean bill of health.

So what about Snowy; well I’d been watching a lump on her ear and as I feared it is a cancerous growth. She’s 12 years old and a white cat that loves the sun. I’ve tried sun block on her ears but she hates it. She puts up with it for about a week then she disappears in the mornings and only returns home in the evening. I could put, and sometimes do put, the block on in the early morning but by the time the sun is hot, I know it will be well past effective.

She’s going back to the vet’s on Friday to have the growth cut out so she will lose about half her ear. The growth is unlikely to grow much over the winter but would start to grow again when the sun is back but I though that if I get it done straight away then the scar tissue has the winter to heal. Apart from that she has a clean bill of health too which I’m really happy about.

A Quiet Wednesday

It didn’t rain today but after the 17mm we had yesterday the ground was far to wet to work today. The sky also remained overcast all day so it became a day of bits and pieces mainly indoors.

While letting out the chickens this morning I glanced over to my saffron bed and here it is…my very first home-grown saffron. It looks like I’ll double the quantity tomorrow too! While it might be one of the most expensive items by weight around at the moment, I don’t think I’ll be making my fortune just yet.


Later on in the day I was on my way back to the chickens to give them some grain and found this little chap in the grass.



He was only 15cm, 6 inches long at the most, about the same size as the hedgehog I saw last year. I’m wondering now if the hedgehogs are a smaller variety here than in the UK or if I’ve seen juvenile ones each time. Once he’d noticed me photographing him, he headed off across the flowerbeds towards the pile of weeds for burning. As you can see, Patches was curious but she kept her distance so I suspect she’s had a prickled nose before now.


While I love my bonfires, I never just set light to a heap of stuff I’ve left around. I always start a new heap to burn so I don’t inadvertently roast one of these delightful slug catchers. I headed him off and placed him under the bay tree behind the house, whether he will hibernate in the leaves there or head back to the burning pile, I’ll find out when I have the next bonfire. In the meantime I must dig out my hedgehog book and see if there are any ideas for making somewhere for him to hibernate that doesn’t require me doing any construction work as I just don’t have time at the moment.

The rest of the day was spent doing the little things like putting bolts on doors and trying to re-fit the curtain pole on my bedroom. The walls here are a mixture of rubble, breezeblock, terracotta block and bad plaster and one of the rawlplugs holding up the curtain pole had pulled out of the wall taking a rather large piece of plaster with it. So while the filler was setting I even managed a trip to the tip to empty my trailer of all the rubbish in it. All in all a quiet but satisfying day.

Back From The Twilight Zone

As quickly as my lethargy descended it has evaporated, life has started again. So what’s happening, well not much over the last month but the last three days have been busy.

Friday was day one of the recovered me and I set about finishing some to the things I’d started over the last few weeks but been unable to do. So the lawn has finally been mown and with the grass collector on as well for the first time this year. It's been on my to do list for ages and with the leaves now falling I wanted to add the mix of leaves and grass to the compost bin. At the beginning of the week I could only manage a couple of rows before having to give up, Friday there was no stopping me.

After the lawn I decided to get the rotivator out and make a start on the area Sue and I had cleared. After that I thought I should stop and make sure I didn't overdo it.

Yesterday was also a full day although I spent most of it sitting down and reading a book. Ann had her 'car boot in the garden' sale to raise fund for the cats she looks after. I help by manning the stalls and helping with the putting away – it’s a nice way to spend the day, meeting other people and reading when there are breaks.

So round to today when I was looking forward to a lie in but was rudely awaken by the sound of the hunting dogs close by the house. A lot of the dogs are not well controlled and I fear for the cats, chickens and alpacas so it was dressing gown on and outside to see exactly where they were and which direction they were going.

Earlier in the week I took a walk down the garden towards the pond and around the ‘wood’ field, leading to the picture at the top of the post. In the basket are the last tomatoes of this year. I then found a couple of mushrooms lurking in the field below the small alpaca paddock. I was hoping a light shower of rain the other evening would have persuaded some more to appear but sadly not. I also found some rosehips and after my double cold I am going to prepare some rosehip syrup to see me through the winter, although I think I will have to go on some walks with Ann to find a sufficient supply of the hips.

After doing nothing all summer, my mangetout peas have finally bloomed and I’ve just started picking some as the first ground frosts are occurring. In a similar vein my cape gooseberries bloomed too. The fruit is still green and I’m not convinced they will ripen but I’m really hoping some will.

Back to today, I decided to add a little alpaca manure to the ground I’d been rotivating. The soil itself is reasonably fertile but when I lifted the potatoes, which I’d planted on a shallow bed of the droppings the worms had loved the addition and the soil texture had improved. Digging out the old manure heap I discovered it was full of mycelium and beneath the couch grass that had covered the heap I found these.

I’m hoping that I will be able to get a good crop of mushrooms next year now that I know they will grow here and where to look.

Finally for tonight, a picture of Sick Chick. She’s still looking OK but I will be checking her again tomorrow or Tuesday. Her tail is still up and she’s moving round happily with the others and her diarrhoea has stopped as well. I still think she will have at least another maggot attack before the hole is fully healed but I am far more hopeful about her long-term prospects. She’s the chicken in the foreground.

Cat Food Shortage?

Well only locally and caused by me.

I was feeling pleased the other day when I received a 5€ voucher from a local (well local-ish as there’s nothing really local here), gardening store. The cats were just about out of their food and the price of a 10kg bag has risen to over 63€. So that brought the cost back to around 58€, about the same as it was a year ago, so I duly bought a sack. Why is it, by the way, that cat food cost so much more than dog food?

Then at the beginning of the week I was going through the ‘publicity’, the lists of offers at the various supermarkets delivered weekly by the posrman, and couldn’t believe my eyes. The farming chain was selling the very same at the amazing price of 45€90. That was just too good an offer to miss – so I bought 3.

I may not have much in store for me this year but the cats are in food until the new year.

Digging Deep

Time is passing so quickly it’s frightening. So what have I been doing; well, digging digging, labouring and ploughing mainly.

While the tractor was on loan for a few days I continued with the pottager area. The general weeds come out quite quickly but the couch grass is another matter. It takes half a day to dig an area that would take about an hour otherwise, but the good bit is seeing the barrow full of roots ready for burning.

The cats also love it when I’m out digging and I usually have my entourage, the only one missing here is Hazel and she was watching me from the patio off to the left.


Digging also unearths scores of these, mole crickets which scamper away to find cover as soon as possible. My guess is that they don’t taste too good as Cid usually leaves them alone while he goes crazy for grasshopper snacks.



Talking of digging, a month of so back I was lifting the garlic and I unearthed this gorgeous little fellow, a baby toad. Up by the chicken house I’ve seen, but never had my camera of course, an adult that is at least the size of a saucer and possibly a bit bigger.


Monday I had the tractor back so decided to get on with ploughing the cereal field. There was the customary hour or so to fuel and check over the tractor plus hitch up the plough. Over the summer, G and I have been working out how to set up the plough so it does actually plough and not just slide over the surface.

The main problem is getting the lift arm short enough; it’s a chicken and egg type of situation. It’s best length is the length it needs to be when it’s actually in the ground ploughing but while it’s still too long it is difficult to get it into the ground.

I read one tip somewhere about running the tractor up onto blocks on one side to mimic the working position of one set of wheels in the rut which I might try next time, this time though I could put the tractor into the last ploughed rut and adjust it there. Still it takes time as it’s all larger than me and being large lumps of iron, rather heavy. It’s working pretty well now, the only slight problem being that the short lift arm means that the leaver to turn the shears now hits the back of the tractor and unless the plough is downhill from the tractor I have to get out and release the locking mechanism and manually swing the plough over. But it keeps me fit. I’ve about a third of the field still to do so it’s looking like the weekend before that will be finished assuming the weather holds.

Part of the reason for it taking so long is that other things need to be done as well; shopping for instance as I hadn’t been for a couple of weeks and I wanted to restock my basics stockpile. Then yesterday it was time to help Ann and Regis. They were stripping the tiles off the roof of Ann’s garage/barn and wanted an extra pair of hands to stack all the handmade terracotta tiles. With three pairs of hands it was done in the morning with the tiles all stacked in known amounts in fruit storage boxes ready for sale.

Ann produced a wonderful lunch and then I crawled home – nothing to do with moving the tiles but I’ve gone down with a head cold. At first I thought I’d managed to give myself another asthma like attack, as the last bale of hay I opened was full of mildew but as yesterday morning passed and no breathing problems had developed overnight as last time I realised it was just a cold. I put it down to the rapid drop in temperature over the last week or so plus the differences between the night and day temperatures too.

So the rest of the week is down to ploughing, the pottager if time and the weather holds, chopping wood if the weather doesn’t. I’ve also a trip to the dentist today – yes another but I hope this will be the last – and then a trip to Deb’s from Lehners in France as she has a Sussex hen and cock along with a Sussex-cross cock for me to add to the hen collection. It will be the final get together before she returns to the UK at the end of the month. Then over the weekend I’ve spotted a local agricultural fair which might produce some more point of lay hens.

It’s Autumn!

Another season is officially here and the last of my summer visitors has departed for the UK so it’s time to play catch-up with the blog.

Last Thursday was celebration day, it was Snowy’s 12^th birthday and while Sue and I has a glass of wine, the cats celebrated with some tuna.

And talking of pets that brings me round to Cheep Cheep; he’s been growing fast. This photo was taken around the time G made the outside run for him.

About a week later he was too big for the box we were keeping him in and we moved him to the segregated area in the hen house. After a week there we let him mix with the other hens but put him in the separate run in the chicken enclosure. Eventually he was getting a bit big for that and had learnt to keep out of the way of the other chickens really well so he is now running round on the edge of the flock – being the smallest he is at the bottom of the pecking order.

This photo was taken a short while before G and M left and you can see just how much Cheep Cheep has grown.

Looking at his feathers we think Cheep Cheep is a male. He’s still very tame and will sit on my arm to eat the wheat when I feed the chickens. His friendliness is a good thing on his part, he is now in line for reserve cockerel while the cockerel from the earlier hatching has therefore been renamed Coq au Vin.

Many thanks to M for the pictures of Cheep Cheep.

Picture News Catch Up

Just for a change (please note sarcasm here) it has started to rain but as there is no accompanying thunder I’m going to take the opportunity to catch up on a couple of the photographs I’ve taken. A word of warning, the final one is a bit gruesome so scroll down with care. Oh and I've just noticed that this is post 150, my how posts fly when you're enjoying them.

First up though are some new arrivals to the farm.

I eventually let mum sit on 6 eggs because both she and I were first-timers; in the end she has 3 chicks. One egg exploded about 2 weeks into the incubation. I tried candling them but they all looked the same to me. Of the remaining 5, two hatched over last Saturday night and one the following day. Another chick died before it finished getting out of the egg and the final egg exploded when I threw it onto the bonfire site after mum had abandoned it for 2 days.

Now it remains to be seen how many of the chicks are female and how many male. While I would like more layers, chicken for the pot is good too. Here’s one protective mum.

The weather while still wet is warming up and the cats are loosing their winter coats. This is no problem with the short haired cats, Cid and Patches, but it means fur balls for the long-haired cats, Snowy and Hazel.

Snowy adores being groomed with the flea comb as it removes all the dust and unwanted fur and you only have to show her the comb for her to leap onto your lap to be groomed. A bonus for me is that as she is totally white, if there are any unwanted livestock on her they are easy to spot against her white fur.

Hazel on the other hand detests being combed. She has far more under fur that mattes into great big lumps that eventually needs cutting off, another thing that she hates. I finally managed to collar her the other day and subjected her to a comb through; this is the result of a couple of minutes combing.

The pile was about half the size of her and when I returned from getting the camera I at first thought it was her on the seat. I’ve now got all but one lump of matted fur off her and am working away at it. Trying to cut fur on a wriggling cat is rather nerve-racking so I have to wait until she is in one of her sleepy moods and then cut a bit and then tease a bit out with my fingers. She’s a bit happier with me combing the rest of her coat now so I’m hoping that I can keep on top of it and stop any more mattes from forming.

Gruesome picture alert.

I went out into the garden the other morning and spotted this offering on the lawn.

I don’t know if it is a stoat or a weasel as the tip of it’s tail had been eaten. I always remember being told that a Stoat has a tip to its tail. This only works with the Least Weasel, which is the usual one in the UK.

The Post I Feared

This morning the vet has telephoned to say that Mr Tibbs died in the night.

He was only my cat for a very short time but in that time he made a big impression. He had obviously been a loved cat at one time , he adored being stroked and having a fuss made of him. He was also one of the gentlest cats I have ever come across; even the first time I got hold of him to capture him and get him castrated, he fought by wriggling like mad until he could get away but kept his claws sheathed and didn't bite.

I'm going to collect his body a bit later and bury him where he can always overlook the view he liked to look out across.